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An overview despite more than thirty years of intermittent fanfares proclaiming the onset of the postindustrial society, our manufacturing industries are still the basic driving force of our economy. Their growth has been one of the dominant sources of our rising standards of living as well as of our nation's expanding influence in international affairs since the beginning of this century. Both of these achievements would be seriously undermined by a failure to maintain the competitive strength of this critical sector of our economy through continued vigorous development. Therefore, confronting the threats to these industries from abroad and establishing the means of dealing with them effectively must become a national priority.

PARLIAMENT passed the Equal Pay Act in 1970 and it comes into full force at the end of 1975. In the meantime a Government order could increase the pay of women to at least 90 per cent of men's by December 31st next year. Like other legislative forays into the industrial world in recent years, this Act, despite its deceptively simple title, bristles with problems and will greatly change the country's economic life.

Future research into forecasting and its relationship with new product planning will benefit from a more thorough analysis of the decision‐making processes involved at the micro‐level. Decisions to develop and introduce new products are predicted upon a corporate decision maker's judgement as to future buyer needs, competitive behaviour, technological change and the competitive abilities of the firm.

Models for valuing an option to exchange one commodity for another, or any combination of n commodities for some combination of m others, are applied to the capital budgeting problem. By analyzing a project in the exchange option pricing framework, it is possible to draw wellfounded conclusions about the effects on project value of such attributes as flexibility and innovativeness. A project which uses systems that have many alternative uses is recognized by such analysis to be more valuable than an otherwise identical project which uses very specialized systems, because the former provides a greater array of choices. Likewise, a company which thinks of a new use for some kind of system will be able to generate a project which has a higher value than any other company could generate from the same system. By including divestiture as one of the alternatives in the portfolio of options representing a project, it is possible to incorporate project abandonment into the analysis, which is an improvement over earlier methodologies which simply add the value of the “abandonment option” to the discounted cash flow net present value. Finally, shortcomings of the options approach to capital budgeting are discussed.

An emerging wave of competitively aggressive moves originating in the operations function is a striking new phenomenon of the 1980s. These moves are creating an arsenal of strategic weapons that are essentially physical. While the weapons are numerous, their common feature is that they are derived from better deployment and management of physical assets.

The objective of this paper is to present the existing state of research relating to the steel industries.

A conference can range from good to bad. It can be well or poorly organized, comfortably or indifferently housed, a profitable or wasted use of time. If conferences were rated like hotels and stars indicated their merit, the one held in Munich at the end of October should be awarded the maximum number.

This paper aims to review the life and work of one of America’s earliest social researchers, Robert Staughton Lynd (1892-1970). In doing so, it also re-introduces Lynd’s seminal Middletown studies to a wider audience within academic consumer research.

Using the historical-biographical method, light is shed on the developments that led to the publication of the Middletown studies and on the way these studies were received by various audiences.

The critical impetus of interwar social researcher Lynd was to some extent an outcome of his own entanglement with professional marketing and advertising, and of his Protestant religiosity. This insight has important bearings for critical consumer research as well as consumer culture theory today.

Market and consumer research comes in many forms. Throughout its history, market and consumer research benefitted from and overlapped with the rise of social research. To fully understand the social and political implications of their work, market and consumer researchers need to have firm knowledge of this interaction with the social sciences and with religious movements in a secular society.

Very little is known about the interaction between Robert Lynd’s social research and the sphere of market and consumer research. This interaction is studied by drawing on the secondary literature and on archival sources.

To get the full power of the corporation driving your strategy, it has to be integrated into the company culture. This sounds like an abstract idea, but it isn't. To successfully implement strategy, your management team must first:

Three important problems face managers in coming to terms with the advent of microprocessors. Microprocessors offer radical new possibilities for designing products and systems but the latter need to be conceptualised as wholes rather than seen as series of discreet but interconnected sub‐systems. The second difficulty lies in evaluating and choosing a CAD system in that confining the evaluation to the implications for the drawing office can result in failure to consider factors vital to the company's future. The third problem lies in the implications of automation for production. The benefits spill out beyond the boundaries of the department in which a particular piece of capital equipment is installed, emphasising the need for a strategic approach.